Descriptions

One of the basic questions facing transportation planners and road managers is how to provide and maintain a road system that provides efficient access to the forest while limiting adverse effects roads can have on water and soil resources. The purpose of this study is to develop decision support models that will lead to improved economic and environmental efficiency in the management of forest road networks. In particular, I focus on developing techniques to facilitate tradeoff analysis and help landowners identify optimal erosion control policies.
Forest roads contribute to accelerated erosion, which can degrade water quality and aquatic habitat. Federal agencies in the Pacific Northwest are actively seeking to remove and/or improve roads in order to restore watershed condition, and private landowners face regulatory restrictions under the Clean Water Act and state forest practice acts. Though the treatment that best achieves management objectives for a single road can often be identified, at larger scales the combination of treatments to assign to a suite of roads can become too large for enumeration. In these circumstances decision aids can and have been used. This dissertation is comprised of five manuscripts that pair industrial engineering and forest engineering principles in order to provide relevant decision support tools to facilitate forest road management. The manuscripts address a range of available treatments, including regular maintenance, upgrading, and road removal.
The first chapter describes the challenges associated with erosion control, reviews available road treatments, and summarizes salient applications of decision support for road management, focusing on applications where controlling road-related erosion was an objective. The second chapter introduces a tradeoff analysis framework for controlling road-related erosion. The third chapter presents an algorithm for routing maintenance vehicles (graders) across a forest road network in order to minimize total tour length, a proxy for operating cost. Chapter four extends this work to a multi-objective context, seeking efficient solutions that simultaneously minimize vehicle operating cost plus grading cost and hazard weighted rut depth, a measure of environmental performance. Chapter five develops optimal policies for recycling aggregate from decommissioned forest roads, and demonstrates that recovery and reuse of aggregate can subsidize road removal projects. Chapter six extends this work to a multi-objective context, approximating the efficient frontier for length of road removed and removal cost, and investigating further the potential for aggregate recycling to effectively subsidize decommissioning projects. Chapter seven concludes the dissertation with a review of the preceding chapters.

description.provenance : Rejected by Julie Kurtz(julie.kurtz@oregonstate.edu), reason: Rejecting because this is a Word document and needs to be converted to a PDF. Once revised, open the item that was rejected, replace the attached file with the revised file and resubmit.
Thanks, Julie on 2009-04-15T17:59:51Z (GMT)